Jeff Bewkes: Not A Big Lou Dobbs Fan (TWX)

Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes spent a good 45
minutes talking about weighty issues about digital media, social
networking, the future of AOL, etc, at the D conference today. The first
question from the audience: "Lou Dobbs is a hateful xenophobe.
Why are you employing him?"

That's our paraphrase of Consumer Electronics Association head
Gary Shapiro's query. Our paraphrase of Bewkes' response: I don't
really like him, either. But hey, what are you gonna do?

A more comprehensive parphrase: "We get a lot of questions about
that. We try to get [CNN] to be impartial. I personally disagree
with positions that Lou has, and talk to him a lot about it. And
we are constantly at pains to identify what Lou says as
commentary."

Jeff then got a crack at different version of the same question:
"Why are you hiring Glenn Beck? He should be on Fox, don't you
think?" This time Jeff's answer was a little more polished: "I
wouldn't... we have all points of view. Most of the criticism
that we get is that we have insufficent representation of the
points of view that Glenn Beck represents."

Did anyone else in the audience care about anything other than
who Jeff employs on CNN? Yes. Yahoo exec Scott Moore got quite
worked up about which listing Web giant had the more popular
news, finance and entertainment sites. We talked to some other D
attendees who also got exercised about this, but we have to admit
this one left us cold. Video highlights below: